Page 36 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Madeleine did not pursue it.

She finished her tea, settled Lady Sophia with a sheet of arithmetic and a stern injunction to give the answers to Mrs Holland at noon, and at a quarter past ten she went down the back steps — not the front steps; a Governess did not, on her half-day, use the front steps —let herself out into the mews, and walked the length of it and came out at last into Grosvenor Square, from the side street beyond the house, with her bonnet tied and her shawl folded over her arm and a small reticule with three shillings and a folded sheet of foolscap in it.

It was a fine morning. The Square was full of the particular brightness of mid-April, and the plane trees in the central garden were unfurling their leaves with a kind of inattentive haste, as though they had remembered, late, that it was the Season, and a great deal was expected of them. Madeleine set off east. She walked at the steady Governess’ pace which had become, in the more recent years, her natural pace; she crossed Bond Street and went down Conduit Street and along Hanover Square and into Oxford Street, where she fell in among the press of clerks and porters and apprentice boys with bolts of cloth on their shoulders, and she let the noise of it close over her head with something that felt, very nearly, like relief.

By the time she reached Holborn it was a little after eleven. The coffee house was an old one, three doors from Chancery Lane, with a bow window full of grey light and a board over the door that said NEW’S in faded letters, where the painter had given up. Beatrice was already there, in the inner room — Madeleine saw her at once, in the corner under the print of a hunt, with her bonnet on the table and her gloves folded inside it and a pot of something steaming in front of her, which would be chocolate, because Beatrice considered coffee an affectation.

“Maddie.”

“Bea.”

They did not embrace. Two ladies in a public coffee house did not embrace; Beatrice had been raised on the same long catechism of small refusals as Madeleine had, and they had both learned, in their different impoverished ways, to mind it.

But Beatrice rose and her hand came across the table and found Madeleine’s wrist and held it for the space of one breath, and Madeleine held Bea’s wrist back, and then they both sat down, and Beatrice poured chocolate into the second cup, and the thing was done.

“You look thin.”

“I always look thin. You looked thin to me at Christmas.”

“You look thinner.”

“Bea.”

“I am only telling you what I see. Aunt said to look at you, and I have looked, and I will tell her that you look thin.”

“Tell her that I am perfectly well. Tell her that the house is warm, and the table is generous, and Mrs Holland sees to it that I eat.”

“Mrs Holland?”

“Mrs Holland. She is the housekeeper. She is sixty, and she has decided that I am not a fool, which is a very great compliment from her, and she gives me a piece of cake on Sunday afternoons with my tea.”

“Cake,” said Beatrice, and made the small inward face that she had made about cake since they were both small. “Well. That is something.”

Beatrice was twenty-six. She was the eldest of the three Wharton girls; she had been out for five seasons before their father’s investments had failed and their father had died, in that order, four years and six months ago; and she had borne the wreck of the family with the dry capable competence that had always been hers, and which had served her, since, as a sort of armour. She kept house, now, for their aunt, their mother’s sister, in a damp cottage in a village just outside Bath, on what their mother’s brother — a clergyman with five children of his own and a great deal of conscience — could spare them; and she came up to town once or twice a year, on the cheap stage, when there was a piece of family business that could not be done by letter, and she stayed in a respectable lodging house in Bloomsbury and she ate very little and she went home, each time, looking a little smaller about the mouth.

She did not look smaller about the mouth today. She looked, in fact, almost well.

“What is the errand?”

“Mr Hatchard. The lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn — you remember him. There is a thing of Papa’s still in train. He thinks — he is not sanguine, mind, he is never sanguine, but he thinks — that there is a possibility of a small sum out of the South Sea business. Not much. A hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred, if we are very lucky and the other claimants are very unlucky.”

“That would —”

“Yes. It would. It would mean Aunt need not have the cottage roof patched again with that miserable thatcher who steals her tea when he gets the chance – we could get it fixed properly. It would mean that Georgiana could have a new gown for the autumn, instead of turning the green one for the fourth time. It would mean — many small things. None of them very grand.”

“It would mean a great deal.”

“It would mean a great deal.”

Beatrice took a sip of her chocolate.

She set the cup down.

“And you. You are to tell me about you.”

“There is nothing to tell. The child is twelve. The child is intelligent and indulged and inclined to be lazy, and I am curing her of the laziness, slowly, by means of The Vicar of Wakefield and a number of dull pages of French verbs. She has taken —” Madeleine hesitated, and chose her word — “an attachment to me. It is the kind of attachment a child of twelve forms when she is the last in the nursery and her sisters are gone, and it will not last past her first proper friend of her own, but while it lasts it makes the work easier.”

“And the mother?”